UTSA joins national effort to elevate public impact research
Seeking to increase the societal impact of university research, the University of Texas at San Antonio joined a multi-year collaborative effort led by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities to identify and promulgate new approaches to support faculty and researchers undertaking Public Impact Research (PIR). PIR is a framework for university research that improves lives and serves society locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.
The effort, called Supporting Public Impact Research through Institutional Transformation (SPIRIT), is funded by the National Science Foundation. SPIRIT will work with UTSA and three other partner universities — the University of California, Davis; Pennsylvania State University; and Washington State University — to pilot new approaches to improve the evaluation and support an environment for more PIR on their campuses.
"At UTSA, we are deeply committed to advancing research that creates meaningful impact both locally and globally," said Heather Shipley, UTSA provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. "This collaboration with APLU and our partner institutions presents an exciting opportunity to develop new pathways for supporting faculty. By reimagining how we assess and recognize their contributions, we are removing obstacles and encouraging greater participation in research that serves society."
UTSA’s three-year pilot project — a joint collaboration by Faculty Success and University Libraries and Museums — focuses on supporting early and mid-career faculty in STEM disciplines. UTSA has revised its promotion and tenure policies to recognize and value a broader range of research activities, including fundamental, interdisciplinary, applied, community-engaged, and translational research. Having established the foundation for this work, the UTSA pilot will focus on partnering with university librarians to identify and develop tools that can translate community-engaged and applied research to non-traditional bibliographic metrics or altmetrics (e.g., research cited in state or national policy documents), and then embedding the newly developed recognized metrics of scholarly impact into institutional processes and tools.
"Our goal is to ensure that UTSA faculty, especially early and mid-career scholars, feel empowered to pursue innovative research that benefits the public," said Kelly Nash, senior associate vice provost for faculty affairs. "Through our collaboration with SPIRIT, we are expanding how we recognize the tangible impact of research, from community engagement to real-world applications. By integrating new metrics into our institutional processes, we can more accurately capture the full scope of scholarly contributions."
Kelly Nash, UTSA's senior associate yice provost for faculty affairs, offers perspective on why public impact research is important and how UTSA is part of a large grant-funded effort to support faculty and researchers who undertake community-engaged research.
Other SPIRIT pilot project focus areas include providing additional training and support to promotion and tenure review committees, ongoing professional development activities for scholars, and a micro-grant program.
"Public research universities have a rich tradition of working with their communities to tackle vexing challenges through research and community engagement, but too many barriers can still stand in the way of greater impact," said Jessica Bennett, Assistant Vice President of STEM Education at APLU and a co-Principal Investigator on the project. "We know one longstanding hurdle to greater faculty engagement in Public Impact Research can be a narrow focus on faculty evaluation and assessment. By working with institutions that want to broaden their assessment practices to provide greater incentives for PIR work, we’re aiming to identify and elevate additional institutional paths for enhanced public impact."
APLU will work with partner institutions to:
- Understand strategies to support faculty engaging in PIR through campus pilot projects.
- Generate cross-campus learning through a facilitated community.
- Elevate learning from SPIRIT to other practitioners and university leaders through convenings, workshops, and toolkits.
- Engage in mutual knowledge exchange with related national efforts, projects, and organizations through engagement with national knowledge partners (ADVANCE Partnership: Strategic Partnership for Alignment of Community Engagement in STEM, Advancing Research Impact in Society, Association of Research Libraries, Promotion and Tenure in Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Pew Charitable Trusts’ Evidence Project.
"This project presents a promising development in increasing the currently limited empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different institutional change efforts to support public-impact research," said Jennifer Renick, Assistant Professor of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research at the University of Memphis and a co-Principal Investigator on the project. "I'm very excited about the potential of our findings helping to advance public-impact research at many universities across the country."
APLU is a membership organization that fosters a community of university leaders collectively working to advance the mission of public research universities. The association’s membership consists of nearly 250 public research universities, land-grant institutions, state university systems, and affiliated organizations spanning across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, six U.S. territories, Canada, and Mexico. Annually, member campuses enroll 5.3 million undergraduates and 1.4 million graduate students, award 1.4 million degrees, employ 1.3 million faculty and staff, and conduct $61 billion in university-based research.
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